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A Texas lawmaker is proposing a state law that would prohibit wireless carriers from throttling mobile Internet service in disaster areas.

Bobby Guerra, a Democratic member of the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives, filed the bill last week. "A mobile Internet service provider may not impair or degrade lawful mobile Internet service access in an area subject to a declared state of disaster," the bill says. If passed, it would take effect on September 1, 2019.

Further Reading

The bill, reported by NPR affiliate KUT, appears to be a response to Verizon's throttling of an "unlimited" data plan used by Santa Clara County firefighters during a wildfire response in California last year. But Guerra's bill would prohibit throttling in disaster areas of any customer, not just public safety officials.

Wireless carriers often sell plans with a set amount of high-speed data and then throttle speeds after a customer has passed the high-speed data limit. Even with so-called "unlimited" plans, carriers reserve the right to throttle speeds once customers use a certain amount of data each month.

Despite the Verizon/Santa Clara incident, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has taken no action to prevent further incidents of throttling during emergencies. Pai's repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules allows throttling as long as the carrier discloses it, and the commission is trying to prevent states from imposing their own net neutrality rules.

Verizon said its throttling in Santa Clara was a customer-support error. The throttling might not have been prevented even if net neutrality rules were still in place, but Pai's FCC has largely abandoned its oversight authority over broadband providers' network management practices, letting carriers choose when and where to throttle.

The FCC's net neutrality repeal is being challenged in a federal appeals court, and the repeal's effect on public safety and state laws played a major role in oral arguments earlier this month. No ruling has been issued yet, but US Circuit Judge Patricia Millett criticized the FCC for failing to address public safety in its repeal order. Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins pointed out that the FCC's attempt to preempt state laws, if allowed, could prevent states from prohibiting throttling of firefighters' broadband service.

"Throttling in Santa Clara was a customer-support error and might not have been prevented even if net neutrality rules were still in place"

This means they need an entirely different regulation imposing fees large enough that it will prevent it despite the state of net neutrality. This wouldn't be the first time Verizon got the industry new regulations due to their public statements.

It seems like there could be legit reason to throttle during an emergency, for example if 75% of cell towers go down, a bunch of fibre gets cut, etcetera. Making sure every customer gets at least some bandwidth seems really important.

Or is there a more precise sort of throttling that would be banned here. Obviously cutting off bandwidth to first responders during a disaster SHOULD NOT happen. But is this the right instrument to assure that?

It seems like there could be legit reason to throttle during an emergency, for example if 75% of cell towers go down, a bunch of fibre gets cut, etcetera. Making sure every customer gets at least some bandwidth seems really important.

Or is there a more precise sort of throttling that would be banned here. Obviously cutting off bandwidth to first responders during a disaster SHOULD NOT happen. But is this the right instrument to assure that?

Load balancing and throttling are two different things. Throttling reduces speeds even though the network itself is perfectly able to support higher speeds. If a disaster takes out parts of the physical network, then network performance as a whole suffers, and you can't provide higher speed even if you want to.

It seems like there could be legit reason to throttle during an emergency, for example if 75% of cell towers go down, a bunch of fibre gets cut, etcetera. Making sure every customer gets at least some bandwidth seems really important.

Or is there a more precise sort of throttling that would be banned here. Obviously cutting off bandwidth to first responders during a disaster SHOULD NOT happen. But is this the right instrument to assure that?

In a disaster I don't really care if my neighbor can watch Netflix at 4k, but I do care if the rescuers can't access all the data they need to find and help people, so without seeing the details of the bill I reserve judgement.

Ehmm.. Not sure this is a good idea. If the network is over saturated it might be necessary to throttle non-critical services. So disallowing throttleing completely could end up hurting rescue operations again.

Ehmm.. Not sure this is a good idea. If the network is over saturated it might be necessary to throttle non-critical services. So disallowing throttleing completely could end up hurting rescue operations again.

Perhaps we need all public government services to be considered critical as a baseline. Also they can have the bandwidth to support the needs of their customers if they actually push infrastructure upgrades. The same ones they promise every time they get a merger would be a great start.

Possibly the only good application of priority traffic is for emergency communication, and even then only if the public by way of government chooses what counts as priority traffic and that list should be lean, transparent, and frequently audited.

Private companies should have no input. Their incentives are incompatible with making decisions in the public interest.

Writing laws based on hypothetical scenarios or one-off incidents isn’t a good way to make public policy. That’s a tough argument to make, because it puts me on the same side as whatever demon perpetrated that one incident, but the fact is public policy has to look at the whole forest not just one ugly tree. This kind of thing is similar to calling to increase sentences for (insert crime here) whenever a particularly sympathetic victim comes along or the “crime” makes the news (there have even been proposed laws to limit Pokémon go playing in public spaces, a phase that lasted one summer). Well, having your criminal penalties based off of the outlier cases is going to lead to excessive incarceration, just as making a law for every bad experience someone has with a utility is going to drive up the cost of utilities (a million pages of regs to handle one-off situations won’t stop big companies from raising prices, but it will give them a stick with which to have regulators beat down smaller startups that don’t have the resources to understand and comply with all the regs).

It seems like there could be legit reason to throttle during an emergency, for example if 75% of cell towers go down, a bunch of fibre gets cut, etcetera. Making sure every customer gets at least some bandwidth seems really important.

Or is there a more precise sort of throttling that would be banned here. Obviously cutting off bandwidth to first responders during a disaster SHOULD NOT happen. But is this the right instrument to assure that?

Load balancing and throttling are two different things. Throttling reduces speeds even though the network itself is perfectly able to support higher speeds. If a disaster takes out parts of the physical network, then network performance as a whole suffers, and you can't provide higher speed even if you want to.

Still, I would at bare minimum want the bill to be heavily proofread by people who can properly articulate the difference to avoid a situation where the wording inadvertently penalizes load balancing in these situations.

But Guerra's bill would prohibit throttling in disaster areas of any customer, not just public safety officials.

Just because someone isn't a public safety official doesn't mean that they're communications can't be life-or-death. Watching Netflix like mentioned above is something I wouldn't mind being throttled in an disaster area, to help preserve bandwidth. But the cutoff shouldn't just be whether someone is a public safety official or not.

It seems like there could be legit reason to throttle during an emergency, for example if 75% of cell towers go down, a bunch of fibre gets cut, etcetera. Making sure every customer gets at least some bandwidth seems really important.

Or is there a more precise sort of throttling that would be banned here. Obviously cutting off bandwidth to first responders during a disaster SHOULD NOT happen. But is this the right instrument to assure that?

Load balancing and throttling are two different things. Throttling reduces speeds even though the network itself is perfectly able to support higher speeds. If a disaster takes out parts of the physical network, then network performance as a whole suffers, and you can't provide higher speed even if you want to.

Verizon already only throttles if there is congestion. They prioritise keeping room on the network for those on more expensive or pay by the GB plans and throttle unlimited plans. By throttling certain users they can deliver better performance to others.

That...doesn't seem right. Their $40 "unlimited" plan explicitly caps mobile hotspot at 600 kbps, for instance. And while they don't state it in terms of bandwidth the way "DVD-Quality Streaming (480p)" is presented pretty clearly suggests they're throttling video streaming.

In a disaster I don't really care if my neighbor can watch Netflix at 4k, but I do care if the rescuers can't access all the data they need to find and help people, so without seeing the details of the bill I reserve judgement.

A million times this.

In a disaster its entirely possible that the network is degraded and cannot handle everyone getting unlimited traffic. And if you're in the middle of a disaster and are at a point where you have nothing you can do to help, and maybe have power, I'll bet you'll burn up some data making video calls and watching netflix.

Prioritizing is not load balancing, it's throttling. If there is a reason for that prioritization then it's acceptable. I hope to god they do this right and allow legitimately high-priority traffic (first responders et. al) to be given as much bandwidth as needed if the network becomes saturated.

This is why the net neutrality bill was good. It allowed this. We need it back. Granted, an extension to mandate prioritization of legitimately emergency traffic didn't exist (I don't think) so something like this could be good. But I'm not sure if that's what this is.

It seems like there could be legit reason to throttle during an emergency, for example if 75% of cell towers go down, a bunch of fibre gets cut, etcetera. Making sure every customer gets at least some bandwidth seems really important.

Or is there a more precise sort of throttling that would be banned here. Obviously cutting off bandwidth to first responders during a disaster SHOULD NOT happen. But is this the right instrument to assure that?

Load balancing and throttling are two different things. Throttling reduces speeds even though the network itself is perfectly able to support higher speeds. If a disaster takes out parts of the physical network, then network performance as a whole suffers, and you can't provide higher speed even if you want to.

Verizon already only throttles if there is congestion. They prioritise keeping room on the network for those on more expensive or pay by the GB plans and throttle unlimited plans. By throttling certain users they can deliver better performance to others.

That...doesn't seem right. Their $40 "unlimited" plan explicitly caps mobile hotspot at 600 kbps, for instance. And while they don't state it in terms of bandwidth the way "DVD-Quality Streaming (480p)" is presented pretty clearly suggests they're throttling video streaming.

In the wildfire throttling case, "congestion/network issues" is a red herring, as neither were present during that.

Writing laws based on hypothetical scenarios or one-off incidents isn’t a good way to make public policy. That’s a tough argument to make, because it puts me on the same side as whatever demon perpetrated that one incident, but the fact is public policy has to look at the whole forest not just one ugly tree. This kind of thing is similar to calling to increase sentences for (insert crime here) whenever a particularly sympathetic victim comes along or the “crime” makes the news (there have even been proposed laws to limit Pokémon go playing in public spaces, a phase that lasted one summer). Well, having your criminal penalties based off of the outlier cases is going to lead to excessive incarceration, just as making a law for every bad experience someone has with a utility is going to drive up the cost of utilities (a million pages of regs to handle one-off situations won’t stop big companies from raising prices, but it will give them a stick with which to have regulators beat down smaller startups that don’t have the resources to understand and comply with all the regs).

You have to strike a balance, but the flip side is that unique incidents show us things we haven't given sufficient consideration to. There is an actual problem here that needs a solution. And anyone who thinks "the telecoms can be trusted to fix it on their own" is a fool.

Not in an emergency! In a disaster it is clearly beneficial for everyone to have a little bandwidth to email/message/VoIP than for some people to be doing background system updates and others not being able to coordinate rescue efforts.

And it's not that some people are going to intentionally waste bandwidth. Automatic stuff can happen on devices that could be deferred instead of eating precious bandwidth.

It seems like there could be legit reason to throttle during an emergency, for example if 75% of cell towers go down, a bunch of fibre gets cut, etcetera. Making sure every customer gets at least some bandwidth seems really important.

Or is there a more precise sort of throttling that would be banned here. Obviously cutting off bandwidth to first responders during a disaster SHOULD NOT happen. But is this the right instrument to assure that?

Load balancing and throttling are two different things. Throttling reduces speeds even though the network itself is perfectly able to support higher speeds. If a disaster takes out parts of the physical network, then network performance as a whole suffers, and you can't provide higher speed even if you want to.

I want to add that in fact data access is incredibly important to civilians during a disaster - for example, my main source of general fire news during those fires was the CalFire videos posted to Facebook where the PIO would go over the map and show where they had active fire, where they hoped to hold it, and where they planned to let it burn. This was extremely valuable because it meant if you saw smoke in certain areas you knew it was all according to plan, but in other areas it meant you'd better bug out and fast, much faster than they'd be able to get a warning out.

In fact, sad to say, in general Facebook was my community's major source of communication during that disaster - and we weren't sharing cat videos, but instead videos and images viewing the fire at various locations and informational videos for the various evacuation centers. We don't have full time journalists who can get the data to people in real time.

Data was also essential for the text messaging used to get out the various official alerts.

Because this area is lightly populated, and the terrain is very foldy, the bandwidth was rarely congested. It was available or not based on whether your tower had burned, but if a tower was there, it had no trouble handling the traffic.

Now, certainly in a situation in a highly populated area, bandwidth management may be a concern. No one has a problem with that. It's just about throttling users based on what billing plan they have and their activity before the disaster.

People in the disaster area were busy and they were also managing around power outages. So not so much eating bonbons and watching more netflix than their data plan would normally accommodate. FWIW, AT&T, much as I hate to say anything nice about them, waived all data overage fees and throttles during our fire disaster time.

It seems like there could be legit reason to throttle during an emergency, for example if 75% of cell towers go down, a bunch of fibre gets cut, etcetera. Making sure every customer gets at least some bandwidth seems really important.

Or is there a more precise sort of throttling that would be banned here. Obviously cutting off bandwidth to first responders during a disaster SHOULD NOT happen. But is this the right instrument to assure that?

Load balancing and throttling are two different things. Throttling reduces speeds even though the network itself is perfectly able to support higher speeds. If a disaster takes out parts of the physical network, then network performance as a whole suffers, and you can't provide higher speed even if you want to.

Therefore you'd need throttling and prioritisation in order to keep the network usable for the people who are ranked highest by whatever metric you're using. Banning throttling outright might sound good in theory but there are some potential unintended consequences, and that is why even in net neutrality there is a "loophole" called reasonable network management.

It seems like there could be legit reason to throttle during an emergency, for example if 75% of cell towers go down, a bunch of fibre gets cut, etcetera. Making sure every customer gets at least some bandwidth seems really important.

Or is there a more precise sort of throttling that would be banned here. Obviously cutting off bandwidth to first responders during a disaster SHOULD NOT happen. But is this the right instrument to assure that?

Load balancing and throttling are two different things. Throttling reduces speeds even though the network itself is perfectly able to support higher speeds. If a disaster takes out parts of the physical network, then network performance as a whole suffers, and you can't provide higher speed even if you want to.

The bill itself doesn't use these terms. It's very short and simple:A mobile Internet service provider may not impair or degrade lawful mobile Internet service access in an area subject to a declared state of disaster under Section 418.014.

I think a court would be likely to say load balancing is not "impair" or "degrade". However, I don't think they could do any type of content-based restrictions. E.g. blocking Netflix to allow other communications to have a higher priority.

Throttling in the sense of restricting speeds when there is sufficient capacity would certainly run afoul of this proposed text, though.

Traffic management:Pull over to allow the firefighting equipment to pass by

Throttling:You're not allowed to use your car to evacuate the fire unless you pay the $50 fee because you already drove up to your cap of 200 miles this month.(Or if you don't like walking speed, we can bump you up to our "unlimited driving" plan, that allows you 500 miles for only $30/mo more.)

The bill itself doesn't use these terms. It's very short and simple:A mobile Internet service provider may not impair or degrade lawful mobile Internet service access in an area subject to a declared state of disaster under Section 418.014.

I think a court would be likely to say load balancing is not "impair" or "degrade". However, I don't think they could do any type of content-based restrictions. E.g. blocking Netflix to allow other communications to have a higher priority.

Throttling in the sense of restricting speeds when there is sufficient capacity would certainly run afoul of this proposed text, though.

That language seems really vague to me. Impair/degreed how? To anyone? Maybe those are legal terms of art for telecommunications. But otherwise it's hard to see how to apply that "common sense" language to actual network behavior.

This would only make sense if mobile service internet providers DO impair or degrade lawful mobile internet services as a matter of course, and are permitted to do so when there is not a declared state of emergency.

I think this is absolutely an appropriate area for regulation, but would enforcement of this language accomplish the public service goal?

Throttling:You're not allowed to use your car to evacuate the fire unless you pay the $50 fee because you already drove up to your cap of 200 miles this month.(Or if you don't like walking speed, we can bump you up to our "unlimited driving" plan, that allows you 500 miles for only $30/mo more.)

Ah, THAT scenario makes a ton of sense to disallow in emergency situations.

Honestly, requiring any old phone that can connect to a tower to provide some sort of access in emergencies would make sense. Hand that old Nokia to the 10 year old in case you get separated or something.

If the telecoms didn’t pull the shit they do such as imposing artificial data caps, throttling when unnecessary, and letting their infrastructure rot by holding back reinvestment money as a means of manufacturing artificial short term gains, none of this would be in the news.

This problem was born out of the ever increasing greed of our near monopolistic telecom providers and is allowed to continue because of corrupt politicians like chairman Reese’s.

Throttling:You're not allowed to use your car to evacuate the fire unless you pay the $50 fee because you already drove up to your cap of 200 miles this month.(Or if you don't like walking speed, we can bump you up to our "unlimited driving" plan, that allows you 500 miles for only $30/mo more.)

Ah, THAT scenario makes a ton of sense to disallow in emergency situations.

Honestly, requiring any old phone that can connect to a tower to provide some sort of access in emergencies would make sense. Hand that old Nokia to the 10 year old in case you get separated or something.

I based it on how the firefighters were scammed.

Their mobile command and control center, OES 5262, had a mobile connection for their comms, which included constantly uploading/downloading the lastest aerial/satellite images, tactical maps, and such.

They started with a 50Mbps connection that got throttled by Verizon down to 30kbps after hitting the 25GB cap while in the middle of operations.

When they contacted Verizon, Verizon said the fire department could fix the ussue by upgrading from their $37.99 "unlimited" plan to either the $39.99 (also throttled) or the $99.99 (for 20GB + $8/GB) plans.

This after Verizon had previously promised them that their special government high-speed unlimited data account had been properly flagged as a "truly unlimited" one after the last time Verizon throttled it.

While working things out with Verizon, the firefighters managed to restore function to the command center by swapping in am alternate SIM card with a different account, immediately restoring full connection speed.

Eventually, the FD went and bought the $100+ plan, greatly increasing their costs in the hopes they don't get throttled again.

Ehmm.. Not sure this is a good idea. If the network is over saturated it might be necessary to throttle non-critical services. So disallowing throttleing completely could end up hurting rescue operations again.

The difference between throttling and physical limits of the service were explained previously. The kind of voluntary throttling they're talking about is unnecessary throttling, when lines are running just fine, for the purposes of forcing accounts to upgrade - which is essentially what Verizon did (they reached their data cap, and there were no unusual loads on the lines at the time the firefighters were throttled).

When the loads are heavy, the lines aren't even able to run at full speed. That's the involuntary kind of throttling that happens when loads need to be balanced to maintain ANY kind of service. That's going to happen whether or not there's a law against it, simply because you can't legislate physics.

What would be better in cases where the physical limits are reached in an emergency/disaster is to throttle non-essential traffic and prioritize emergency and rescue services. That's basically the polar opposite of what Verizon did.

Writing laws based on hypothetical scenarios or one-off incidents isn’t a good way to make public policy. That’s a tough argument to make, because it puts me on the same side as whatever demon perpetrated that one incident, but the fact is public policy has to look at the whole forest not just one ugly tree. This kind of thing is similar to calling to increase sentences for (insert crime here) whenever a particularly sympathetic victim comes along or the “crime” makes the news (there have even been proposed laws to limit Pokémon go playing in public spaces, a phase that lasted one summer). Well, having your criminal penalties based off of the outlier cases is going to lead to excessive incarceration, just as making a law for every bad experience someone has with a utility is going to drive up the cost of utilities (a million pages of regs to handle one-off situations won’t stop big companies from raising prices, but it will give them a stick with which to have regulators beat down smaller startups that don’t have the resources to understand and comply with all the regs).

You have to strike a balance, but the flip side is that unique incidents show us things we haven't given sufficient consideration to. There is an actual problem here that needs a solution. And anyone who thinks "the telecoms can be trusted to fix it on their own" is a fool.

The biggest issue with utilities is a lack of competition. So whenever more regs are added, you have to ask if they will make it easier for new players to enter the industry and you have to ask whether the most likely player to get punished is going to be a big monopoly with many lawyers or a small telco making an honest mistake. It seems like what a lot of people want here is not a vibrant market full of choice, but one giant monopoly so heavily regulated that it has to be perfect in every way. If only it worked like that.

It seems like there could be legit reason to throttle during an emergency, for example if 75% of cell towers go down, a bunch of fibre gets cut, etcetera. Making sure every customer gets at least some bandwidth seems really important.

Or is there a more precise sort of throttling that would be banned here. Obviously cutting off bandwidth to first responders during a disaster SHOULD NOT happen. But is this the right instrument to assure that?

Load balancing and throttling are two different things. Throttling reduces speeds even though the network itself is perfectly able to support higher speeds. ...

Ehhhhh, technically correct, but misleading.

Imagine 5 people maxing out their data connections. Throttle 1 of them.

You're right, throttling would reduce the speed of that one customer who's being throttled, but it would also increase the speed for everybody else.

Instead of this bill, I think the correct thing to do would be to give higher network priority to first responders, which could also be described as "throttling" everybody else, depending on the circumstances.

...The difference between throttling and physical limits of the service were explained previously. The kind of voluntary throttling they're talking about is unnecessary throttling, when lines are running just fine, for the purposes of forcing accounts to upgrade - which is essentially what Verizon did (they reached their data cap, and there were no unusual loads on the lines at the time the firefighters were throttled)....What would be better in cases where the physical limits are reached in an emergency/disaster is to throttle non-essential traffic and prioritize emergency and rescue services. That's basically the polar opposite of what Verizon did.

So, throttling is bad, and the solution is throttling.

Unfortunately the use of the word "throttling" has come to mean something very specific and bad, so we can no longer have an intelligent conversation involving the term throttling without everybody confusing each other.

Ehmm.. Not sure this is a good idea. If the network is over saturated it might be necessary to throttle non-critical services. So disallowing throttleing completely could end up hurting rescue operations again.

The difference between throttling and physical limits of the service were explained previously. The kind of voluntary throttling they're talking about is unnecessary throttling, when lines are running just fine, for the purposes of forcing accounts to upgrade - which is essentially what Verizon did (they reached their data cap, and there were no unusual loads on the lines at the time the firefighters were throttled).

When the loads are heavy, the lines aren't even able to run at full speed. That's the involuntary kind of throttling that happens when loads need to be balanced to maintain ANY kind of service. That's going to happen whether or not there's a law against it, simply because you can't legislate physics.

What would be better in cases where the physical limits are reached in an emergency/disaster is to throttle non-essential traffic and prioritize emergency and rescue services. That's basically the polar opposite of what Verizon did.

As has already been stated. Load-balancing is not enough in a disaster. You also need priotization, which IS a form of throttling. I just hope the bill allows that, from what we got here it wasn't clear.